9780141993041

Cover: Detail from Peter and Jeremiah by Pier Matteo d’Amelia (c.1450–1503/8).

Fresco, Vatican City. Photo Scala, Florence

D A N I E L R E Y, L I T E R A R Y R E V I E W

‘A scrupulously scholarly account of the Bible’s many translations ... an even-handed approach to a subject that historically has caused bloodshed’ K A T H R Y N H U G H E S , M A I L O N S U N D AY

‘A richly rewarding study that challenges many assumptions about the text that has done so much to shape our culture and heritage’ SAR AH FOOT, BBC HIS TORY M AGA ZINE

JOHN BARTON THE WORD

‘Immensely scholarly, well written and sprinkled with light touches ... Barton’s book demonstrates that the history of biblical interpretation, with its vast implications for centuries of theology and politics, is inseparable from the issue of translation’

THE WORD On the Translation

’A book bejewelled with insight and erudition and compassion’ S TUART KE LLY

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The Word ‘John Barton has a rare ability to explain complicated matters lucidly in literate prose . . . a finely intelligent and informed guide’ Robert Alter, TLS ‘If you are interested in the question of translation, then you must go out and buy The Word . . . profound scholarship, lightly worn. This book makes excellent reading’ Nicholas King, The Tablet, Books of the Year ‘His writing is sage and measured, scholarly but accessible’ Mark Bostridge, Spectator ‘Wide-ranging and engaging’ Michael Cronin, Irish Times ‘Scholarly intelligence, a readable style, and insights at every turn . . . It is decades of expertise in the fine wood-grain of biblical texts and languages, applied to the clump of trees in a landscape that is scripture as we mostly encounter it’ Cally Hammond, Church Times ‘Ought to be of interest to anyone interested in what we mean by our words. . . . a book bejewelled with insight and erudition and compassion’ Stuart Kelly, Scotsman ‘Even staunch atheists will learn a great deal from Barton about the horns of a dilemma that could belong to the devil himself’ Economist ‘Enjoyable . . . A great point that Barton made in his 2019 bestseller A History of the Bible is that the Bible has, for most of its history, been read in translation’ Christopher Howse, Daily Telegraph ‘A fascinating and readable introduction to how we get from foreign texts in the ancient world to the modern English Bible heard in church or taken down from the shelf at home . . . Barton is a faithful guide’ John Ritzema, Catholic Herald

about the author John Barton was the Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford from 1991 to 2014 and, since 1973, has been a priest in the Church of England. His bestselling A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths was shortlisted for the Wolfson Prize for History, won the Duff Cooper Prize and has been translated into more than ten languages. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2007 and is a Corresponding Fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

JOH N BA R TON The Word On the Translation of the Bible

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For all members of Campion Hall

Contents Foreword

xi

Glossary of English Editions

xiii

Introduction

1

1 A Brief History of Biblical Translation

9

2 Bringing the Bible to the Reader

28

3 Taking the Reader to the Bible

57

4 Translation in Equilibrium

86

5 Style and Register

107

6 Worship and Inclusive Language

133

7 Words and Meanings

158

8 The Bible as a Web

184

9 Translation and Biblical Criticism

198

10 Which Bible?

212

Conclusion: Purpose and Power

226

Notes

241

Bibliography

265

Index

277

Index of Biblical References

297

vii

‘If every man’s humour were to be followed, there would be no end of translating’ Bishop Bancroft at the Hampton Court Conference, 1604

Foreword

Two books above all others stimulated me to write this one. The first was George Steiner’s now classic After Babel, which I read with enthusiasm when it was first published in 1975 and have never stopped reflecting on. More recently, David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (2011) showed me that it is possible to write accessibly on translation even for readers unfamiliar with the languages discussed. I have myself found wide and encouraging interest in the topic as it pertains to the Bible, and have benefited from a lot of excellent feedback on various talks I have given – much of it from those with no specialist knowledge of either translation or the Bible. A number of friends and colleagues advised me along the way, and I must single out Nicholas King, SJ, himself the translator of the entire Greek Bible, for his sage assessment on both the practical and the theoretical issues the biblical translator faces.

This is not a handbook on how to translate the Bible, however, nor a reflection on a personal attempt to do so. It does not chronicle the history of different versions either, but analyses how translators over the centuries have approached the Bible – and what this means for everyone else. In mapping the field it draws on some recent contributions to translation studies, but it is not intended to be of interest only to theorists and practitioners of the discipline but rather to everyone with a stake in the Bible, whether as a document of faith or landmark of culture.

The modern translations cited are principally in English, but some examples are taken from other languages I know. Writing this book, I often wished I had command of some of the non-European languages into which the Bible is regularly translated by dedicated linguists xi

foreword

seeking to spread the Christian gospel, but I am necessarily restricted to those I can read with understanding. Fortunately, that does include the ancient Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek in which the Bible was first written. I draw on dozens of translations, but biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version, Anglicized Edition, unless otherwise noted. This has become the default version for much biblical study today.

My work on this project has all been conducted after 2014, when I retired as Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford. I have since been a Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, Oxford, which has proved the perfect base for thinking and writing about the Bible. It has been a privilege to be part of such a stimulating, warm and tolerant community. The book is dedicated to all my friends at the Hall with great affection and gratitude.

I am grateful to my agent, Felicity Bryan, who so sadly died while the book was in preparation. Felicity was an inspiration and the provider of endless encouragement to me, as to so many others. Warmest thanks now to Catherine Clarke, who continues her work for all of us represented by Felicity Bryan Associates. I’m delighted to benefit again from the expert and meticulous copy-editing of Linden Lawson and the insight of my editor at Penguin, Ben Sinyor. With this book, as with my previous one, A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, he has worked through every line of the text and made detailed suggestions that helped me to articulate implications of my arguments I was barely aware of myself. It is said, with a nod to Schleiermacher, that good interpreters understand their authors better than the authors understand themselves; and this has proved true of Ben. Campion Hall, Oxford April 2022

xii

Glossary of English Editions

ASV CEV ESV GNB JB KJV NEB NET NETS NIV NJB NRSV REB RNJB RSV RV TNIV

American Standard Version (1900–1901) Contemporary English Version (1991–9) English Standard Version (2001) Good News Bible (1966–76) Jerusalem Bible (1966) King James Version (1611) New English Bible (1961–70) Christian Standard Bible/New English Translation (2001) New English Translation of the Septuagint (2000–2007) New International Version (1973–8) New Jerusalem Bible (1985) New Revised Standard Version (1989) Revised English Bible (1989) Revised New Jerusalem Bible (2018–19) Revised Standard Version (1946–52) Revised Version (1881–5) Today’s New International Version (2002–5)

xiii

Introduction

Almost everyone who reads the Bible today reads it in translation.

There are Jews who can read the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament) in the original languages, Hebrew and Aramaic; and Greek Orthodox Christians can understand the New Testament in the language it was written in, even though Greek is now very different from that used by its writers. Otherwise, however, it is only scholars and students of the Bible who learn the Bible’s original languages. Everyone else depends on translations.

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century is widely seen as the time when the Bible began to be translated into vernacular languages. But the use of a translated Bible goes back much further. In western Europe vernacular versions came in to replace not the original texts, but the Latin Bible, which was itself a translation. Where the Old Testament is concerned, the Latin Bible in turn rested only partly on the Hebrew and Aramaic. It was a rendering made largely in the fifth century CE by St Jerome (d. 420 CE), who did use the original Hebrew and Aramaic, but also earlier Latin translations that rested on a previous Greek version. That Greek text, now often known as the Septuagint, had been produced in the third century BCE for Jews who could no longer read Hebrew fluently. As we shall see, most Christians from the New Testament writers until the Reformation knew the Old Testament only in its Greek or Latin guise. Very few Christians after the age of the apostles knew any Hebrew. And by the time that vernacular translations of the New Testament were being made in Europe, few there could still read either Testament in Greek. The Latin Bible was ‘The Bible’, just as for generations of Anglophone readers the King James (or ‘Authorized’) Version has been ‘The Bible’, and remains so to an extent 1

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that is striking, though not unique to the English language. Most clergy will claim to have heard someone say, ‘If the King James Bible was good enough for St Paul, it’s good enough for me.’ When I told a colleague some years ago that I was writing a history of the Bible, he replied: ‘Presumably starting with the King James Version?’, and was surprised to learn that I was beginning in the tenth century BCE, the era preceding Homer, rather than the seventeenth century of our era, the time of Shakespeare and the production of the King James Version.

So translation of the Bible is not a new phenomenon, even relatively speaking. Down the centuries, ever since there was a complete Bible, those who could read it in its original languages have formed a minority, and translation has been the primary medium through which Scripture has been manifest and understood. It is easy to miss just how remarkable this is. In Islam, which is the stereotypical ‘religion of the book’, translation of the Qur’an is frowned upon. Translations are described as paraphrases or guides to the holy text, aids to those who are learning to read it in Arabic, and it is only in its original form that it is authoritative. But Judaism, and even more so Christianity, are not quite so defined by the exact wording of a holy book in a language that many believers do not know: they allow, and in the Christian case positively encourage, translation, so that the meaning of their Scriptures can be understood by all.

Translating the Bible has often been seen, indeed, as a sacred task.

Not only is it important in itself, so that the truth revealed in Scripture can be known; it is also crucial that it is undertaken with a properly reverent attitude. The translators of the King James Bible saw their work as a sacred trust. Translating the Bible was not, as they saw it, just like translating any other book, but demanded a particular kind of care and exactness. People’s salvation depended on getting the wording right. Biblical translation for most practitioners has not been a hobby, nor even a serious literary endeavour, but a contribution to human salvation and perseverance. Translators have been persecuted and executed for renderings of the Bible deemed heretical, while in the modern world large sums have been poured into the manufacture of new versions because they were deemed essential – especially in cultures never before possessing a vernacular Bible – that it is difficult to imagine being spent on any other book.

2

Introduction

Yet biblical translation cannot be wholly distinguished from translation in general. Indeed, translating the Bible has often been the paradigm case of translation, not only because it has been translated more often and widely than any other book, but also because theories about how it should be rendered into other languages have been the framework for thinking about the work of ‘secular’ translation. Attention to the wording of the original (the ‘source’) text, yet also to the intended readership in the language the text is being translated into (the ‘target’), is present in every act of translation, not only with the Bible. The assembly of flat-pack furniture is rarely a religious experience, but anyone who has tried to match badly rendered Chinese to equally bad diagrams is familiar with the practical effects of poor translation. At a more critical level, the work of interpreters can aid or sabotage international agreements. In all spheres translation matters, and many of the principles involved are common to both biblical and secular contexts.

This book is about how translators negotiate the difficult task of producing usable versions of the Bible in the language of their own day, while remaining true to the original. It is a task that raises issues of faith and interpretation, as well as the obvious technical requirements, such as an intimate knowledge of the languages in which the Bible was written. This is not intended primarily as a history of biblical translation, though examples of different types will be taken from past practice, but is rather a discussion of what translation means for readers of the Bible, whether they are religious or not.

We will begin, though, with a brief history of biblical translation (Chapter 1), and with a special emphasis on translation into English. I then move on to detail the two main possibilities in rendering the Bible as set out by Eugene Nida, the father of modern biblical translation, usually known respectively as formal and functional equivalence – what most people would call literal versus free translation (Chapter 2). In reality, there is a spectrum of possibilities.

Nida can be needlessly Procrustean, and I try to develop a new map of various kinds of translation, suggesting that the most interesting cases fall between Nida’s two types (Chapter 3). The pursuit of a ‘really accurate’ translation is something of a red herring: all types have their place and none is suitable in all contexts. While there can 3

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be translations that are simply wrong, there cannot be one that is uniquely right. Nevertheless, it seems irrefutable that some are particularly ingenious or brilliant. Following George Steiner, I argue that good translation involves a kind of equilibrium between source and target (Chapter 4).

From here the book spills outwards to address matters the translator must consider but which are rarely discussed – and the significance of these for all those who rely upon their labour. Should the style be modern or ‘traditional’ (Chapter 5)? Should the development of Hebrew over time, or the New Testament’s occasional use of archaizing Greek, be indicated in the translation? How far can differences of register be identified, and how should any that are identified be conveyed to a modern reader? Should occasional examples of ‘bad’ Greek in the New Testament be rendered in bad English? How much should the demands of liturgical use weigh with translators – and should this incline the translator in the direction of ‘inclusive’ language (Chapter 6)?

Should translations register or elide the difference in meaning between Hebrew words in the Old Testament and their Greek ‘equivalents’ in the New – ‘soul’, for example, or ‘salvation’ (Chapter 7)? Are critical issues about the possibly composite nature of some texts to be taken account of in translation, or do they belong to a different sphere in which the translator should not interfere? Is the whole Bible to be treated as a single work, in which ‘intertextual’ links are to be noted and marked in the translation, or should each biblical book be regarded as a separate task, a self-contained entity (Chapter 8)? Should the original text be emended where it appears corrupt or mistaken, before it is translated (Chapter 9)? And finally, in the case of the Old Testament, which canon should be the basis for translation: the original Hebrew, or the Greek or Latin versions that have had an official status in respectively the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches (Chapter 10)?

These questions may seem a luxury to the practical demands made on modern translators, many of whom work in faith to provide the first Bible ever in a language for which they had also to devise the first writing system. In much of the world, it is demanding enough to give the sense of the Bible as accurately as possible, for those who have never heard its message before. According to the United Bible 4

Introduction

Societies (UBS), the Bible now exists in some 700 languages – more than ten times the number for J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the only widely translated work of comparable length – and in nearly every case in only one version. Translators employed by the UBS, and by Wycliffe Bible Translators, work tirelessly to increase their coverage: there are, after all, something like 7,000 living languages in the world.1 One language stands apart from this. There is a huge number of English translations, with new ones appearing every year. It means that those with no Hebrew or Greek can compare different versions and at least see some of the possibilities for what the text might mean, and – I suspect – encourages other would-be translators to try their own hand at the difficult but rewarding task of capturing the biblical messages in English. And because there evidently isn’t only one ‘correct’ translation of any text, it challenges readers to be open to ambiguity and nuance in the text when they see just how differently various interpreters tackle the same book. It enables, in sum, the kind of work this book undertakes. And given this, it makes sense to ask searching questions about the theoretical basis of the entire enterprise, and the significance of its practice for the religions which hold the Bible sacred. On the whole, as Robert Alter argues, translating the Bible into English has been thought to depend on expertise in the biblical languages, but little reflection on the nature and practice of translation as such, and not always much literary talent. Consequently biblical translation is not highly ‘theorized’, whereas translation studies is now a growing field for other kinds of translation (and Nida’s ideas in particular have been assimilated into it, even though they were originally developed for the sake of Bible translation).2 There are theoretical questions that are not asked insistently enough.3 Theoretical does not mean abstract, however, and it is all too easy to underestimate the importance and the power of translating the Bible, as though it were a side issue in the history of religion and theology. The great religious awakening we associate with the Reformation is often thought to have caused great numbers of Christians who previously only had access to the Latin Bible to want to read the Scriptures themselves, and therefore to have provided the impetus for vernacular translation across Europe. Diarmaid MacCulloch has argued, conversely, that the 5

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surge of translations of the Bible made in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – before Luther’s ninety-five theses and what is usually reckoned to be the onset of the Reformation – was a major factor in bringing about reform. Reading the Bible in their own language led Christians to see that many of the religious customs and ideas they knew from the Church were not attested in Scripture, and therefore to question them. That realization was a significant cause of reform, rather than merely one of its consequences.4 Translating the Bible thus drove religious change – and not only in early modern Europe. A millennium and a half earlier Christians scattered around the coast of the Mediterranean overwhelmingly used the Old Testament in its Greek translation as they defined their new religion, and we shall see how features particular to the Septuagint came to shape their ideas about the identity and nature of Jesus. Greek renderings of titles for the God of the Hebrew Bible, especially ‘Lord’, came to be applied also to Jesus, as we can see in the New Testament, suggesting a degree of contiguity between him and God that the Hebrew could not. This is not to say that Christians would not otherwise have come to regard Jesus as divine; but at the birth of Christianity, when his relation to God was not yet settled, the precise terms used to name him were certainly significant. Had the Hebrew Bible remained untranslated, it is difficult to imagine the development of Christianity in late antiquity following the course it did.

Translators have more power than they often realize, therefore.

They are not mere conduits between an original text and a vernacular version, and translation is not simply the transferring of a body of information out of one language and into another. What is said is not separable from how it is said, and sentences expressing what we might call the same thoughts expressed in different languages are never exact equivalents. Translated texts that are purely informative – instruction manuals, for example – can sometimes match the original very closely indeed, but this is precisely because they lack metaphysical significance. Literature, however – and for believers the Bible may be more than literature, but it certainly isn’t less – is imprinted by the particular linguistic culture that gave rise to it, and its passage to and setting in another can be far from straightforward.

For the majority of its history, Scripture has been encountered 6

Introduction

almost entirely in languages other than those in which it was written.

Its translators have been among the principal agents in mediating the Bible’s message to readers and hearers, even in shaping what that message is. Our picture of Christianity in particular – a religion formed in dialogue with translated Scripture – is incomplete without taking in the history, practice and theoretical underpinning of their endeavours.

7

1 A Brief History of Biblical Translation1

The books of the Old Testament were for the most part written in Hebrew, though there are a few sections in Aramaic,2 an equally ancient relation – about as close as Dutch is to German, or Spanish to Italian. The New Testament was all composed in Greek. Sometimes it is possible to tell, from a syntactic or lexical feature, that the authors of the Gospels spoke and thought in Aramaic, which had become the normal language of everyday speech in Palestine by the first century CE. None of the books of the New Testament is a translation from that language, however, and some of its authors may well have spoken only Greek, such as the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, and perhaps also Luke. Occasionally it has been suggested that one or other of the Gospels is a translation from some lost Aramaic original, but the idea has never gained much traction.3 By the time the first Gospel (probably Mark) was written, perhaps around 70 CE, Greek was already the main language of Christians, and it remained so for several centuries.

In the 50s and 60s CE Paul was already writing in Greek to the Churches he had founded (and to the Church in Rome), in which no one, evidently, spoke Aramaic.

Greek versions Even before its latest books, such as (probably) Ecclesiastes and Daniel, were being written, the bulk of the Hebrew Bible had already been translated into Greek. Such translation began in the third century BCE.4 It was undertaken not by Christians (who did not yet exist), but

by Jews wanting to help fellow Jews who no longer understood 9

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Hebrew with any fluency because they lived in Egypt, where Greek was the normal language of everyday life. At first the Pentateuch (the five ‘Books of Moses’, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) was translated into Greek, with the rest of the Hebrew Bible following not long after. A legend arose that the initial translation had been requested by the Egyptian ruler Ptolemy II Philadelphus (r. 285–246 BCE). This story is preserved in The Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates,5 dating from the second century BCE, which maintains that the translation was prompted by Ptolemy’s desire to gather copies of all the greatest books in the world into the great library at Alexandria (which did indeed come, in time, to be one of the wonders of the world, a kind of research university).6 He asked the high priest in Jerusalem to send learned men to make a translation of the Pentateuch, six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, and these seventy-two scholars finished their work, with complete agreement, in seventy-two days.

For that reason their version is called the Septuagint, from the Latin for ‘seventy’, abbreviated in Roman numerals as LXX.7 Aristeas does not claim that they were divinely inspired but probably implies it, and a later addition to the text says that each man translated the whole Pentateuch and every version was found to be the same, a feat which surely would have required divine intervention of some kind.8 Though the account is legendary, it is no doubt correct in implying that the Septuagint, and Greek translations of other scriptural books that followed, were made for the community of Jews in Alexandria.

This community came to revere the translation as highly as the original Hebrew, and a sense that it had been made through divine providence passed into the Christian Church. It is normally this version that New Testament writers cite, and in later times even the theologians of Antioch in Syria, although this was a Semitic-speaking area, treat it as absolutely authoritative, just as the Greek Orthodox Church still does today. Though the name Septuagint properly refers to the translation of the Pentateuch alone, the term is nowadays commonly used to designate the whole Old Testament in the Greek Bible.

Once Christians adopted the Greek Bible, Jews started to suspect that they might have tampered with it and distorted the original Hebrew – introducing changes that gave more support to Christian ideas such as the divinity of Christ. (As we shall see, the Septuagint 10

A B r i ef History of Biblical Translat i on

offered the first Christians things the underlying Hebrew could not, though this was a product of developments in theological thinking between the composition of the Hebrew Bible and its translation as well as linguistic features of Greek and Hebrew themselves, rather than the result of Christian interference with the text after the fact.) In the second century CE there were at least three attempts to improve the translation, by three Jewish scholars traditionally called Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion (clearly not their Hebrew names). They tried to make the Greek a more literal version of the Hebrew, Aquila to such an extent that some of his translations are almost incomprehensible, as we shall see later (see Chapter 3). Symmachus produced a new translation, in more stylish Greek. Theodotion’s version is closer to a Greek text found at Nahal Hever near the Dead Sea, containing the Twelve Minor Prophets, probably from the first century BCE – which may show that correction of the Septuagint in a more literal direction was already under way even before the suspicion arose that Christians had altered the text. Eventually, agreed versions of the Greek Bible established themselves, in three different editions (usually called ‘recensions’) used by Christians in different areas: in Alexandria and the rest of Egypt an edition produced by Hesychius, a bishop martyred in 312 CE; in Constantinople and Antioch that of Lucian, and, in between, the version recorded by Origen (d. 254 CE) in his Hexapla, a collation of six different texts of the Bible in parallel columns.

The Greek Bible as it has come down to us includes more books than the Hebrew Bible. These are the books known usually as the Apocrypha, though Catholics and Orthodox Christians describe them as ‘deuterocanonical’, that is, belonging to a second (Greek deuteros ) level within the biblical canon. From early in the Christian era these books were known only in Greek, though some of them were originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic. The Hebrew text of Sirach and Tobit is now partly known thanks to recent archaeological finds. Some books, notably Wisdom of Solomon, were clearly written in Greek from the beginning. The deuterocanonical books were produced later than most books in the Hebrew Bible, mainly in the last two centuries BCE. Though they continued to be read by Jews, the Jewish canon of Scripture eventually excluded them, and they came to be revered only

by Christians. The Greek Bible itself does not distinguish them from 11

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the books that also occur in the Hebrew Bible, and they are interspersed among the books of that Bible without any distinction – narrative books (such as Tobit and Judith) next to other narratives (Chronicles, Esther), and ‘wisdom’ books (Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach) next to other wisdom books (Proverbs, Job). This arrangement can be seen in a modern Catholic Bible such as the Jerusalem Bible or the Revised New Jerusalem Bible. Although it is a translation, the Greek Bible is regarded as the canonical text in the Greek Orthodox Church, in preference to the Hebrew. Whether the Greek Bible, as the Bible of the early Church, should be authoritative for other Christians too is a point we shall return to in Chapter 10.

A ram aic rendering s Jews in Egypt, living in a Greek culture, could not always cope with Hebrew; but in Palestine and Babylonia too Hebrew could be a problem, since Aramaic was the common tongue, and Hebrew was the language only of the learned. So Aramaic translations began to appear.

Some think that Nehemiah 8:8 refers to this activity: when the Torah was read to Jewish exiles newly returned from Babylonia in the fifth century BCE, the Levites ‘gave the sense’, which may mean that they translated it into Aramaic. (The Torah is a Hebrew name for the Pentateuch, but it can also mean all authoritative forms of divine instruction, and in this case we do not know whether what was read was the whole Pentateuch, a selection from it, or other laws and directives that had not yet been canonized.) For a long time Aramaic renderings were oral in character. Indeed, well into the Christian era it was held that the Aramaic version, the targum, should not be written down but produced ad hoc after the scriptural reading in Hebrew in the synagogue, and must not be made by the same person, so as to avoid any impression that the targum was itself inspired or authoritative. Nevertheless, targums did come to be written down. Examples are Targum Onkelos on the Pentateuch, which had become the official version by the third century CE, and Targum Jonathan, a translation of the prophetic books, from about the same period. The targums offer quite ‘loose’ translations, sometimes even radically changing the 12

A B r i ef History of Biblical Translat i on

meaning of the Hebrew text. Indeed, sometimes they offer what are politely called ‘converse’ translations, which give the opposite sense from the original. Thus God’s threat to the Israelites in Exodus 33:3, ‘I will not go up among you’, is rendered in Targum Neofiti ‘I will not remove the glory of my presence from among you’.9 A dialect of Aramaic spoken in Edessa (now Urfa, in south-east Turkey) also acquired its own Christian version of both Testaments, known as the Peshitta, probably in the second or third century CE: the dialect is normally known as Syriac. The Old Testament translation is thought to have been the work of Jewish converts to Christianity. The Peshitta survives as the Bible of the Syriac-speaking Churches (the Church of the East, the Syrian Orthodox Church and the Maronite Church in Lebanon).

Latin translations Greek was the common language of the whole Mediterranean world and of the Middle East from the late fourth century BCE, when Alexander the Great created his empire, until the beginning of the Roman Empire 300 years later. Educated Romans were expected to know Greek. Christian worship was conducted in Greek, even in Rome itself – hence the fragments of Greek that persist in the Western liturgy such as kyrie eleison, ‘Lord, have mercy’. But Latin did eventually take over, and Christians, probably in the Roman territories along the northern coast of Africa, began to make Latin versions of the Bible, normally known as the Old Latin (Vetus Latina ). These were not made from the Hebrew, but from the Greek of the Septuagint; so the Old Latin Old Testament was a translation of a translation. (The New Testament was of course in Greek anyway, so there we have a Latin translation of a Greek original.)

The first person to translate the Old Testament into Latin directly from Hebrew and Aramaic was Jerome (347–420 CE). The Pope, Damasus, had asked him to revise the Latin of the New Testament in the light of the best manuscripts available, but Jerome decided to go further and revise the whole Bible; and he took the major step of learning some Hebrew. Settling in Bethlehem in 386, he found a Christian 13

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convert from Judaism who was able to teach him the language, and he consulted other Jewish scholars, as well as using Origen’s Hexapla in the library at Caesarea. He produced a nearly complete translation of both Testaments.

Jerome’s version was not received very well at first: believers predictably preferred the translation they already knew. Augustine tells us that, when it was first used in what is now Tripoli, the congregation objected so strongly to hearing that Jonah was sheltered by ivy rather than a gourd (as in the Old Latin) that a riot ensued. Eventually, however, Jerome’s translation established itself, especially in Italy and in northern Europe, as the standard, or biblia vulgata – hence the English term Vulgate, though that was earlier applied to the Old Latin and only became attached to Jerome’s Bible in the sixteenth century.

Jerome personally translated the whole New Testament, but in the Latin Old Testament to this day some books still appear in the Old Latin where he did not get around to them, notably Daniel, Maccabees and Sirach (traditionally known in Latin as Ecclesiasticus – not to be confused with Ecclesiastes).

Other translation s During the Middle Ages there were translations of all or parts of the Bible into various languages, often as aids to study. The Hebrew Bible was translated into Arabic, though probably written in Hebrew script,

by Saadia Gaon, a leader of the Jewish community in Babylonia in the tenth century CE. His version is still used by some Jews in Yemen, though there are more up-to-date Arabic versions available. Medieval Christian translations also survive in Ethiopic, and in many European languages. The Psalms are often to be found in translation, usually as aids to monks learning to recite them in the liturgy, and normally rendered from the Latin. There are fragments of Psalters, written in German, dating back to the ninth century and associated with the abbey of Reichenau on Lake Constance. From the fourteenth we have a translation of the entire Bible by Marchwart Biberli (1265–1330), a Dominican from Zurich. There are the remains of a Bible in Gothic, an East Germanic language (now extinct), which is almost the only 14

A B r i ef History of Biblical Translat i on

evidence for that language, along with a biblical commentary in Gothic known as Skeireins, the Gothic for ‘commentary’. The translation, by the missionary bishop Wulfila (311–83 CE), dates to the fourth century, remarkably early for a rendering into a language of northern Europe – though Gothic was widespread at the time and spoken in parts of Italy and France as well as the traditional Germanic lands. Prefiguring the work of so many translators of the Bible for cultures in the modern world with no tradition of writing, Wulfila invented an alphabet for Gothic, based on the Roman alphabet but incorporating letters modelled on runes as well.

In England, Bede is said to have been working on an English translation of St John’s Gospel at the time of his death in 735, and King Alfred (849–99) apparently translated the Psalms, or more likely patronized their translation. Aelfric of Winchester in 1010 seems to have succinctly paraphrased, rather than exactly translated, some of the narrative books of the Old Testament, but wrote that he was hesitant about rendering Scripture in the common tongue because of the danger that the ignorant might misunderstand it – an attitude which hardened in the later Middle Ages into a reluctance to allow lay people to read the Bible at all, and which attracted the anger of the Reformers.

A real translation of the Gospels can be found in the Northumbrian Lindisfarne Gospels, where the Latin text is glossed with an interlinear, word-by-word translation in the local dialect of English.

The Bible was also translated into Slavic languages, following the missionary activity of Cyril (826–69) and Methodius (815–85) in the ninth century: this was used in the liturgy rather than for private study, as with most western European versions. Once again an alphabet was produced especially for the purpose – now known as Cyrillic. According to the posthumous Life of Methodius he translated the entire Bible into Slavonic – what is now called Church Slavonic – in six months in 884. This extraordinary feat may be an exaggeration – he may have translated only the liturgical readings. But there is a manuscript from the following century, the Codex Zographensis, that does contain all four Gospels in their entirety in a Slavonic version. A complete Slavonic Bible was not produced until the fifteenth century.

15

The Word

Th e early m odern pe riod It is clear, from all the translations surveyed so far, that translating the Bible was by no means a novelty by the sixteenth century and the time of the Reformation. The practice had continued in the years before Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses of 1517: the Bible was translated into various forms of German between 1466 and 1522, into Dutch in 1477, into Spanish and Czech in 1478 and into Catalan in 1492. It was Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1439 that facilitated such ventures – as mentioned, it has been argued that the rise in biblical translations made possible by the press helped to prepare the ground for the Reformation, rather than being a product of it.10 Even so, the drive to translate the Bible into various vernaculars gained a fresh impetus from the emphasis placed by the great Reformers, Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, on access to the Bible for all Christians in their own language. A translation of the Bible into Middle German had been made as early as 1350 and was printed in 1466, but it was naturally a translation from the Vulgate, and the translators had no knowledge of Greek or Hebrew. Luther, on the other hand, worked on the New Testament from the Greek of Desiderius Erasmus’s edition and produced a German version in 1522, with the Old Testament, direct from the Hebrew, following in 1534. By then his New Testament had already been translated in its turn into Dutch, Danish and Swedish. Part of his genius was to forge a kind of standard German comprehensible to speakers of the many regional varieties of the language, which was far more varied than English in the late Middle Ages – though for the benefit of readers in the north a translation was made into Low German, with a glossary of unusual words.

Catholics responded by producing versions of their own. The first,

by Hieronymus Emser (1477–1527), adapted an early version of Luther’s New Testament to bring it closer to the Vulgate, and survived in use among Catholics in German-speaking areas into the eighteenth century. Even subsequent Catholic Bibles in German tended to adhere quite closely to Luther, demonstrating a point we shall return to (see Chapter 5): the difficulty of deviating from the classic translation of a 16

A B r i ef History of Biblical Translat i on

text. This is the problem that has beset all translations into English since the King James Version (KJV).

There were Bibles in Middle English, the language of Chaucer, in the late fourteenth century – so-called Wycliffite Bibles, associated with John Wyclif though probably not made by him.11 Being tainted with Lollardy, a sort of proto-Protestant movement critical of the Church’s structures, and of which Wyclif was a leader, these were opposed by the Church hierarchy, as was also the significant translation into modern English by William Tyndale (1494–1536), who had produced his own rendering of the Greek New Testament, inspired by Luther’s, by 1526. Like so many translators in this period he added his own notes, and translated many terms in a way that was tendentious: thus ‘penance’ was rendered ‘repentance’, undermining the medieval system of penitential practices, including indulgences, which were to be such a major negative theme in Luther’s teaching. Many copies of Tyndale’s New Testament were burnt, and Thomas More wrote a refutation in 1529, describing it as heretical; Tyndale himself was arrested and executed in 1536 when he was halfway through translating the Old Testament from Hebrew.

Yet only a year later Tyndale’s version was completed by John Rogers, his associate, and published for the English market as the Matthew Bible, and it was licensed by Henry VIII. By the end of 1539 England had the Great Bible, edited by Miles Coverdale (who had produced a translation of his own in 1535), the first official English Bible. The king directed a copy to be placed in all churches in the land, and it was also a success in Scotland. The Great Bible was essentially a revision of Tyndale as completed in the Matthew Bible, but where Tyndale had not finished the translation Coverdale worked from the Vulgate and from Luther’s German. The year 1560 saw another milestone, the Geneva Bible, produced by the exiles in Geneva who had fled the persecution of the Catholic Queen Mary. In private and domestic use this supplanted previous versions, and it is the Bible of Shakespeare, John Donne and George Herbert, as well as of Oliver Cromwell, John Bunyan and indeed of King James himself; it was also the first vernacular Bible to be printed in Scotland.12 In 1568 there followed the Bishops’ Bible, an official attempt at a compromise between the Great Bible and the Geneva Bible. It did not 17